"But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it."
Genesis 4:7

Serving a Warrant

Anytime we had trouble finding someone whom we had a warrant on, we would go to that person's house in the wee hours of the morning. This worked very well, because everyone has to sleep sometime even if the police are looking for them.

We had just such a case one night, so about 3 a.m. we went up to the house which was way out in the back country. I call it a house because a father and his son lived in it, but really it was no more then a wooden shack with a wooden porch. When we got to the house, I went around back to cover the back door, in case the person we wanted tried to run. The other Deputy went up on the porch to the front door.

When I got around back, I found that there were no windows back there, much less a door. I went back to the front and walked up onto the porch. As the front door opened, I felt the porch give way under me. I stood there with the porch up around my waist as the other officer read the warrant to the man. Luckily, the man agreed to come with us without any argument. He even helped me out of the hole in the porch.

It was the son we were arresting. He was in his early forties. While he was getting dressed to go with us, the other Deputy was reading the Riot Act to the father about having an unsafe porch. He asked him if he knew how much trouble he would have been in if one of us had gotten hurt.

When the son was dressed, we put him in the car and drove off. As we drove off taking him to jail, the old man was out with a hammer fixing his front porch.